Diary

• The debate about George Osborne's penchant for first-class travel and failure to pay the price assumes a different quality when one sees further testimony in the Sunday papers suggesting that this is not the first time the chancellor has been caught out this way. His strategy emerges just a little bit clearer. Austerity doesn't seem so bad if you don't actually pay for things. Still, it could just be that he is at sixes and sevens, and if so, he would be like the other Tories in his fiefdom, who seem unable to make their sums add up. We've heard how the Tories of Cheshire East council spent £800,000 on a development that didn't yet have planning permission, and of its tendency for throwing large cheques at selected officials. But the specifics can blind one to the wider shambles. For it appears that after a series of council tax freezes, delighting the faithful but depressing revenues, the 2011/12 accounts show a deficit of £124m. Usable reserves have fallen by £14m to £61m and the general fund fell £1.1m to £11.4m, well below the council's own risk-assessed minimum level. And thus we have the spectacle in which the chancellor's home authority, run by political acolytes, was last month warned by the Audit Commission that its general fund reserves are no longer adequate for the purposes of bailout. There was a time that George would have helped; with advice, perhaps the loan of his giant calculator. But with ticket collectors on his back, he has problems of his own.

• Tough being a friend of the fugitive Julian Assange, we said last week. More evidence reaches us. Thank God for the Ecuadorean embassy in London. For they have given him sanctuary, and nobody is more relieved than Pranvera Shema, the wife of the esteemed founder of the Frontline Club, Vaughan Smith. The couple had Julian as an involuntary lodger in their country mansion Ellingham Hall in Norfolk for 13 months until he fled down the M11 to London last July. Smith told an audience in the Oxford Cloisters last Friday that not only did she have to put up with Assange, but, at various times, eight of his best friends too. Things got mightily crowded, even with 10 bedrooms and 600 acres around the ancestral pile. It wasn't all bad. "Julian paid for his own food," revealed Smith but time dragged on. Thus "the Mrs" was not unhappy to see the back of Mr Wiki as he headed towards the security of Ecuadorean hospitality. They wish him well from afar.

• And tough times for the hazy, crazy clergyman Bishop Richard Williamson. He has been an Anglican, an Anglo Catholic, then a Roman Catholic. He hitched up with the Lefebvrites, also known as the Society of St Pius X. They refuse to accept the reforms of the second Vatican council, which, among other things, absolved Jews for the crucifixion and accepted that Protestants might not go straight to hell. Things were peachy with them for a while. But hey, that didn't work out. Lately, he has found comfort and camaraderie in Brazil, where he confirmed 100 laypeople without permission. Unsurprising that the society apparently finds him too hot to handle. The website Rorate Cæli, having spoken to society officials and an associate of the bishop himself, says the society now seems likely to cut him loose. Where next? Does the English Defence League need a chaplain?

• For we all can benefit from wise counsel, and what tales Conrad Black will have to tell on his triumphant return to the UK to appear on Friday's Have I Got News For You?. Tales of court, tales of jail, tales of the most recent order that he should find $6.1m to give shareholders of Hollinger International, the media empire he plundered. This was a result. The judge refused to fine Black the extra $4.4m sought by the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Full steam ahead, and in this, the week of Conrad Black, one only hopes the show's participants, messrs Merton and Hislop, will afford the purloining peer the respect he deserves. If so, he probably won't come again.

• Finally, because the perceptions we once had struggle to keep up with reality, one notes that it is still possible to leave a tribute on the website page jimmy-savile.gonetoosoon.org. Entries have slowed. Twitter: @hugh_muir